Fifty Orwell Essays

by George Orwell

reference to it. The English, as he sees it, are invincible because of

  their tremendous physical strength, due mainly to living on beef. Like

  most Englishmen of his time, he has the curious illusion that the English

  are larger than other people (Thackeray, as it happened, was larger than

  most people), and therefore he is capable of writing passages like this:

  I say to you that you are better than a Frenchman. I would lay even money

  that you who are reading this are more than five feet seven in height,

  and weigh eleven stone; while a Frenchman is five feet four and does not

  weigh nine. The Frenchman has after his soup a dish of vegetables, where

  you have one of meat. You are a different and superior animal--a

  French-beating animal (the history of hundreds of years has shown you to

  be so), etc. etc.

  There are similar passages scattered all through Thackeray's works.

  Dickens would never be guilty of anything of that kind. It would be an

  exaggeration to say that he nowhere pokes fun at foreigners, and of

  course like nearly all nineteenth-century Englishmen, he is untouched by

  European culture. But never anywhere does he indulge in the typical

  English boasting, the 'island race', 'bulldog breed', 'right little,

  tight little island' style of talk. In the whole of A TALE OF TWO CITIES

  there is not a line that could be taken as meaning, 'Look how these

  wicked Frenchmen behave!' The only place where he seems to display a

  normal hatred of foreigners is in the American chapters of MARTIN

  CHUZZLEWIT. This, however, is simply the reaction of a generous mind

  against cant. If Dickens were alive today he would make a trip to Soviet

  Russia and come back to the book rather like Gide's RETOUR DE L'URSS. But

  he is remarkably free from the idiocy of regarding nations as

  individuals. He seldom even makes jokes turning on nationality. He does

  not exploit the comic Irishman and the comic Welshman, for instance, and

  not because he objects to stock characters and ready-made jokes, which

  obviously he does not. It is perhaps more significant that he shows no

  prejudice against Jews. It is true that he takes it for granted (OLIVER

  TWIST and GREAT EXPECTATIONS) that a receiver of stolen goods will be a

  Jew, which at the time was probably justified. But the 'Jew joke',

  endemic in English literature until the rise of Hitler, does not appear

  in his books, and in OUR MUTUAL FRIEND he makes a pious though not very

  convincing attempt to stand up for the Jews.

  Dickens's lack of vulgar nationalism is in part the mark of a real

  largeness of mind, and in part results from his negative, rather

  unhelpful political attitude. He is very much an Englishman but he is

  hardly aware of it--certainly the thought of being an Englishman does

  not thrill him. He has no imperialist feelings, no discernible views on

  foreign politics, and is untouched by the military tradition.

  Temperamentally he is much nearer to the small noncomformist tradesman

  who looks down on the 'redcoats', and thinks that war is wicked--a

  one-eyed view, but after all, war is wicked. It is noticeable that

  Dickens hardly writes of war, even to denounce it. With all his

  marvellous powers of description, and of describing things he had never

  seen, he never describes a battle, unless one counts the attack on the

  Bastille in A TALE OF TWO CITIES. Probably the subject would not strike

  him as interesting, and in any case he would not regard a battlefield as

  a place where anything worth settling could be settled. It is one up to

  the lower-middle-class, puritan mentality.

  III

  Dickens had grown up near enough to poverty to be terrified of it, and in

  spite of his generosity of mind, he is not free from the special

  prejudices of the shabby-genteel. It is usual to claim him as a 'popular'

  writer, a champion of the 'oppressed masses'. So he is, so long as he

  thinks of them as oppressed; but there are two things that condition his

  attitude. In the first place, he is a south-of-England man, and a Cockney

  at that, and therefore out of touch with the bulk of the real oppressed

  masses, the industrial and agricultural labourers. It is interesting to

  see how Chesterton, another Cockney, always presents Dickens as the

  spokesman of 'the poor', without showing much awareness of who 'the poor'

  really are. To Chesterton 'the poor' means small shopkeepers and

  servants. Sam Weller, he says, 'is the great symbol in English literature

  of the populace peculiar to England'; and Sam Weller is a valet! The

  other point is that Dickens's early experiences have given him a horror

  of proletarian roughness. He shows this unmistakably whenever he writes

  of the very poorest of the poor, the slum-dwellers. His descriptions of

  the London slums are always full of undisguised repulsion:

  The ways were foul and narrow; the shops and houses wretched; and people

  half naked, drunken, slipshod and ugly. Alleys and archways, like so many

  cesspools, disgorged their offences of smell, and dirt, and life, upon

  the straggling streets; and the whole quarter reeked with crime, and

  filth, and misery, etc. etc.

  There are many similar passages in Dickens. From them one gets the

  impression of whole submerged populations whom he regards as being beyond

  the pale. In rather the same way the modern doctrinaire Socialist

  contemptuously writes off a large block of the population as

  'lumpenproletariat'.

  Dickens also shows less understanding of criminals than one would expect

  of him. Although he is well aware of the social and economic causes of

  crime, he often seems to feel that when a man has once broken the law he

  has put himself outside human society. There is a chapter at the end of

  DAVID COPPERFIELD in which David visits the prison where Latimer and

  Uriah Heep are serving their sentences. Dickens actually seems to regard

  the horrible 'model' prisons, against which Charles Reade delivered his

  memorable attack in IT IS NEVER TOO LATE TO MEND, as too humane. He

  complains that the food is too good! As soon as he comes up against crime

  or the worst depths of poverty, he shows traces of the 'I've always kept

  myself respectable' habit of mind. The attitude of Pip (obviously the

  attitude of Dickens himself) towards Magwitch in GREAT EXPECTATIONS is

  extremely interesting. Pip is conscious all along of his ingratitude

  towards Joe, but far less so of his ingratitude towards Magwitch. When he

  discovers that the person who has loaded him with benefits for years is

  actually a transported convict, he falls into frenzies of disgust. 'The

  abhorrence in which I held the man, the dread I had of him, the

  repugnance with which I shrank from him, could not have been exceeded if

  he had been some terrible beast', etc. etc. So far as one can discover

  from the text, this is not because when Pip was a child he had been

  terrorized by Magwitch in the churchyard; it is because Magwitch is a

  criminal and a convict. There is an even more 'kept-myself-respectable'

  touch in the fact that Pip feels as a matter of course that he cannot

  take Magwitch's money. The money is not the product of a
crime, it has

  been honestly acquired; but it is an ex-convict's money and therefore

  'tainted'. There is nothing psychologically false in this, either.

  Psychologically the latter part of GREAT EXPECTATIONS is about the best

  thing Dickens ever did; throughout this part of the book one feels 'Yes,

  that is just how Pip would have behaved.' But the point is that in the

  matter of Magwitch, Dickens identifies with Pip, and his attitude is at

  bottom snobbish. The result is that Magwitch belongs to the same queer

  class of characters as Falstaff and, probably, Don Quixote--characters

  who are more pathetic than the author intended.

  When it is a question of the non-criminal poor, the ordinary, decent,

  labouring poor, there is of course nothing contemptuous in Dickens's

  attitude. He has the sincerest admiration for people like the Peggottys

  and the Plornishes. But it is questionable whether he really regards them

  as equals. It is of the greatest interest to read Chapter XI of DAVID

  COPPERFIELD and side by side with it the autobiographical fragments

  (parts of this are given in Forster's LIFE), in which Dickens expresses

  his feelings about the blacking-factory episode a great deal more

  strongly than in the novel. For more than twenty years afterwards the

  memory was so painful to him that he would go out of his way to avoid

  that part of the Strand. He says that to pass that way 'made me cry,

  after my eldest child could speak.' The text makes it quite clear that

  what hurt him most of all, then and in retrospect, was the enforced

  contact with 'low' associates:

  No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this

  companionship; compared these everyday associates with those of my

  happier childhood. But I held some station at the blacking warehouse

  too...I soon became at least as expeditious and as skilful with my hands

  as either of the other boys. Though perfectly familiar with them, my

  conduct and manners were different enough from theirs to place a space

  between us. They, and the men, always spoke of me as 'the young

  gentleman'. A certain man...used to call me 'Charles' sometimes in

  speaking to me; but I think it was mostly when we were very

  confidential...Poll Green uprose once, and rebelled against the

  'young-gentleman' usage; but Bob Fagin settled him speedily.

  It was as well that there should be 'a space between us', you see.

  However much Dickens may admire the working classes, he does not wish to

  resemble them. Given his origins, and the time he lived in, it could

  hardly be otherwise. In the early nineteenth century class animosities

  may have been no sharper than they are now, but the surface differences

  between class and class were enormously greater. The 'gentleman' and the

  'common man' must have seemed like different species of animal. Dickens

  is quite genuinely on the side of the poor against the rich, but it would

  be next door to impossible for him not to think of a working-class

  exterior as a stigma. In one of Tolstoy's fables the peasants of a

  certain village judge every stranger who arrives from the state of his

  hands. If his palms are hard from work, they let him in; if his palms are

  soft, out he goes. This would be hardly intelligible to Dickens; all his

  heroes have soft hands. His younger heroes--Nicholas Nickleby, Martin

  Chuzzlewit, Edward Chester, David Copperfield, John Harmon--are usually

  of the type known as 'walking gentlemen'. He likes a bourgeois exterior

  and a bourgeois (not aristocratic) accent. One curious symptom of this is

  that he will not allow anyone who is to play a heroic part to speak like

  a working man. A comic hero like Sam Weller, or a merely pathetic figure

  like Stephen Blackpool, can speak with a broad accent, but the JEUNE

  PREMIER always speaks the equivalent of B.B.C. This is so, even when it

  involves absurdities. Little Pip, for instance, is brought up by people

  speaking broad Essex, but talks upper-class English from his earliest

  childhood; actually he would have talked the same dialect as Joe, or at

  least as Mrs. Gargery. So also with Biddy Wopsle, Lizzie Hexam, Sissie

  Jupe, Oliver Twist--one ought perhaps to add Little Dorrit. Even Rachel

  in HARD TIMES has barely a trace of Lancashire accent, an impossibility

  in her case.

  One thing that often gives the clue to a novelist's real feelings on the

  class question is the attitude he takes up when class collides with sex.

  This is a thing too painful to be lied about, and consequently it is one

  of the points at which the 'I'm-not-a-snob' pose tends to break down.

  One sees that at its most obvious where a class-distinction is also a

  colour-distinction. And something resembling the colonial attitude

  ('native' women are fair game, white women are sacrosanct) exists in a

  veiled form in all-white communities, causing bitter resentment on both

  sides. When this issue arises, novelists often revert to crude

  class-feelings which they might disclaim at other times. A good example

  of 'class-conscious' reaction is a rather forgotten novel, THE PEOPLE OF

  CLOPTON, by Andrew Barton. The author's moral code is quite clearly mixed

  up with class-hatred. He feels the seduction of a poor girl by a rich man

  to be something atrocious, a kind of defilement, something quite

  different from her seduction by a man in her own walk of life. Trollope

  deals with this theme twice (THE THREE CLERKS and THE SMALL HOUSE AT

  ALLINGTON) and, as one might expect, entirely from the upper-class angle.

  As he sees it, an affair with a barmaid or a landlady's daughter is

  simply an 'entanglement' to be escaped from. Trollope's moral standards

  are strict, and he does not allow the seduction actually to happen, but

  the implication is always that a working-class girl's feelings do not

  greatly matter. In THE THREE CLERKS he even gives the typical

  class-reaction by noting that the girl 'smells'. Meredith (RHODA FLEMING)

  takes more the 'class-conscious' viewpoint. Thackeray, as often, seems to

  hesitate. In PENDENNIS (Fanny Bolton) his attitude is much the same as

  Trollope's; in A SHABBY GENTEEL STORY it is nearer to Meredith's.

  One could divine a great deal about Trollope's social origin, or

  Meredith's, or Barton's, merely from their handling of the class-sex

  theme. So one can with Dickens, but what emerges, as usual, is that he is

  more inclined to identify himself with the middle class than with the

  proletariat. The one incident that seems to contradict this is the tale

  of the young peasant-girl in Doctor Manette's manuscript in A TALE OF TWO

  CITIES. This, however, is merely a costume-piece put in to explain the

  implacable hatred of Madame Defarge, which Dickens does not pretend to

  approve of. In DAVID COPPERFIELD, where he is dealing with a typical

  nineteenth-century seduction, the class-issue does not seem to strike him

  as paramount. It is a law of Victorian novels that sexual misdeeds must

  not go unpunished, and so Steerforth is drowned on Yarmouth sands, but

  neither Dickens, nor old Peggotty, nor even Ham, seems to feel that

  Steerforth has added to his offence by being the son of rich par
ents. The

  Steerforths are moved by class-motives, but the Peggottys are not--not

  even in the scene between Mrs. Steerforth and old Peggotty; if they were,

  of course, they would probably turn against David as well as against

  Steerforth.

  In OUR MUTUAL FRIEND Dickens treats the episode of Eugene Wrayburn and

  Lizzie Hexam very realistically and with no appearance of class bias.

  According to the 'Unhand me, monster!' tradition, Lizzie ought either to

  'spurn' Eugene or to be ruined by him and throw herself off Waterloo

  Bridge: Eugene ought to be either a heartless betrayer or a hero resolved

  upon defying society. Neither behaves in the least like this. Lizzie is

  frightened by Eugene's advances and actually runs away from him, but

  hardly pretends to dislike them; Eugene is attracted by her, has too much

  decency to attempt seducing her and dare not marry her because of his

  family. Finally they are married and no one is any the worse, except Mrs.

  Twemlow, who will lose a few dinner engagements. It is all very much as

  it might have happened in real life. But a 'class-conscious' novelist

  would have given her to Bradley Headstone.

  But when it is the other way about--when it is a case of a poor man

  aspiring to some woman who is 'above' him Dickens instantly retreats into

  the middle-class attitude. He is rather fond of the Victorian notion of a

  woman (woman with a capital W) being 'above' a man. Pip feels that

  Estella is 'above' him, Esther Summerson is 'above' Guppy, Little Dorrit

  is 'above' John Chivery, Lucy Manette is 'above' Sydney Carton. In some

  of these the 'above'-ness is merely moral, but in others it is social.

  There is a scarcely mistakable class-reaction when David Copperfield

  discovers that Uriah Heep is plotting to marry Agnes Wickfield. The

  disgusting Uriah suddenly announces that he is in love with her:

  'Oh, Master Copperfield, with what a pure affection do I love the ground

  my Agnes walks on.'

  I believe I had the delirious idea of seizing the red-hot poker out of

  the fire, and running him through with it. It went from me with a shock,

  like a ball fired from a rifle: but the image of Agnes, outraged by so

  much as a thought of this red-headed animal's, remained in my mind (when

  I looked at him, sitting all awry as if his mean soul griped his body)

  and made me giddy...'I believe Agnes Wickfield to be as far above

  you (David says later on), and as far removed from all your aspirations,

  as the moon herself.'

  Considering how Heep's general lowness--his servile manners, dropped

  aitches and so forth--has been rubbed in throughout the book, there is

  not much doubt about the nature of Dickens's feelings. Heep, of course,

  is playing a villainous part, but even villains have sexual lives; it is

  the thought of the 'pure' Agnes in bed with a man who drops his aitches

  that really revolts Dickens. But his usual tendency is to treat a man in

  love with a woman who is 'above' him as a joke. It is one of the stock

  jokes of English literature, from Malvolio onwards. Guppy in BLEAK HOUSE

  is an example, John Chivery is another, and there is a rather ill-natured

  treatment of this theme in the 'swarry' in PICKWICK PAPERS. Here Dickens

  describes the Bath footmen as living a kind of fantasy-life, holding

  dinner-parties in imitation of their 'betters' and deluding themselves

  that their young mistresses are in love with them. This evidently strikes

  him as very comic. So it is in a way, though one might question whether

  it is not better for a footman even to have delusions of this kind than

  simply to accept his status in the spirit of the catechism.

  In his attitude towards servants Dickens is not ahead of his age. In the

  nineteenth century the revolt against domestic service was just

  beginning, to the great annoyance of everyone with over �500 a year. An

  enormous number of the jokes in nineteenth-century comic papers deals